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Loverman chapter ‘The big dream’

So this is me attempting to get back into a normal routine and sort of failing miserably because that routine also includes lifting heavier weights than the balls of Jehovah. So I’m trying to fix my sleep schedule and also sleeping right through every alarm I set as my body tries to heal itself.

Anyway I hope you all had a great christmas and a snappy new years, both mine kind of sucked. Christmas just felt sort of flat and I didn’t feel christmassy at all, I worked on new years so that was a boner killer,

In other news found an awesome new videogame, the mad max game is surprisingly bad ass. Also my new relationship is sort of working out in a weird way. I paired her with videogames in case she reads this just to annoy her.

I don’t want to really go into detail because I’m conflicted I should feel terrible and I sort of do, it’s like I want to be happy while also being stomped on by life in the worst ways imaginable. I’m not saying that for sympathy, I don’t give a shit, it’s just a weird feeling approaching her birthday and feeling so lost and miserable and heartbroken as I’m completely shut out while also being at the start of could be a really happy healthy relationship. One that could actually work and isn’t just setting me up for supreme heart ache down the road.

Someone less of an idiot could maybe wash his hands of the whole thing and forget and just start over but I can’t.

Yeah I kinda wanted to start the new year off light and already fucked that up but hopefully my schedule will open up a bit this month and I can finally get Diana done and start sending her out into the world to get mercilessly torn asunder. I know I’ve been kind of procrastinating and putting it off for the longest time, just like I’ve been putting going to the next weight level in my training. But hey I did that and now I feel like a tenderised piece of meat haha. 

Maybe I can make good on that other stuff too and get a new job. But what the fuck am I even going to spend the money now that she won’t let me see her?

Hmm.

See you…

–

My mother’s old Chrysler pitched and yawed and creaked to a stop with that horrible ratcheting sound of the gear box unto imminent death. Which of course Ericcson not being familiar with it didn’t know exactly the right way it like to be touched. So as not to eviscerate the already ramshackle clutch. Held together with tape and prayers.

 

Still these concerns were beyond me, my main worries were now worms nesting in my ear and being unable scratch my nose. Not being able to turn the pages of the book or change the channel on the television was of particular concern. Forever doomed to just watch whatever anyone else wanted to watch.

 

The girl’s directions weren’t too bad. Although she might have recommended we bring a machete for our trip as the road leading to the house was intensely overgrown. So much so as to almost disappear into the trees.

 

The pornographer Lukas lived in a fairly large new England country house out on the east side near the river. Just a guess really, due to the sound of running water, that being the only sound I heard, no birds chirped nor foxes howled.

 

The house itself was in utter disrepair and looked most certainly abandoned. The face of it was once a white wood, the paint rotted and chipped and discoloured. All but one of the upstairs windows were broken, most likely by bored local children. The roof was tiled in grey slate with a red brick chimney which had collapsed into the attic. The front door was green and hanging off its hinges. A white picket fence surrounded the square building and traced the outline of a truly unruly lawn. Which had swallowed a very rusty looking push mower, most certainly its first victim.

 

Undettered by this Ericcson got out of the car slamming the door of the Chrysler as if to announce himself. He paused only momentarily to absorb a most ominious atmosphere. The building exsoothed a singular loneliness and gave off an almost abstract feeling of revulsion.

 

The autumnal trees behind the house were such deep oranges they almost looked like a mat red canvas against the house. They swayed lightly in the breeze and noiseless things that must have been birds leapt out of them and into flight.

 

Ericcson opened the fence gently and approached the door meaning to knock on the great green edifice. But instead he tried the knob and it was unlocked.

 

We entered, I of course hanging at his side in my bag.

 

But I could see out of a number of holes made in the bag for that direct purpose.

 

Now, being a disembodied head you’d think not much could shock me. But upon entering the house, expecting more filth and degradation as the outside advertised. We were instead greeted with a warming glow.

 

I wondered for a moment if Ericcon and I were seeing the same thing. From the outside it seemed like an abandoned run down shack and from the inside it was a living home of some humble opulence.

 

I could hear the lapping and crackling of a warm fire and the soothing tock of a grandfather clock

 

Ericcson it would seem was entranced and I dared not to wake him as he made an odd noise as if reacting to some unheard tone in a dream.

 

He walked slowly and cautiously towards the noise of the fire into the living, decorated as if a scene in a holiday greeting card. Real logs burned in the fire and wreathes hung over it and on the mantel there were pictures of a happy family although their faces I could not make out.

 

Ericcson walked bow legged and collapsed into an easy chair in the corner allowing me to slump down next to him on the carpeted floor.

 

I didn’t even notice the other person in the room until I heard the chinking of the ice in his drink.

 

“So nice of you to pay me a visit” The man said as he tipped the glass towards Ericcson.

 

He was an odd duck, dressed almost like a hipster mister Rogers; a brown sweater over a plaid shirt. His sleeves rolled up revealing elaborate tattoos, his face too was marked with scarification and tunnels in his ears. His eyes were a disturbing unnatural blue, altered somehow with pigment.

 

“I’ve come to kill you” Ericcson said flatly as if talking in his sleep.

 

“Is that right?” The man smiled and looked into his drink. “Lydia – the girl in the store called me right after you did, this is the only address she knows so I knew you’d come here.”

 

“It’s a trap then?”

 

“Not really, more like a check-up” He motioned down with his head “How do you like your drink?”

 

Ericcson looked down at his hand and saw a whiskey glass there and he jumped as if he suddenly felt like he was falling and dropped it on the floor. The tumbler landed with a dull thud and rolled towards the fire place.

 

“Too bad, that was good stuff” He took a sip of his drink and straightened in his wingback chair. “Well enough with the niceties, I’m sure Niall didn’t impress you too much but you’ll find us a little more prepared.”

 

“You’re Lukas?”

 

“I already told you that” He said as he put his drink down with a clunk on a glass coffee table and then leaned back with his hands across his lap. His hands too were covered in obscure tattoos that looked like child’s drawings and he had odd jewellery on his thumbs. “But enough about that, we’re here for you Zane.

 

The doorbell rang.

 

“Oh that must be our guests”

 

“Guests?” Ericcson said sadly.

–

Check out the rest of the chapter right here on inkitt The big dream

 

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Loverman Chapter 6 ‘Ask for Lucas’

Heyo,
Gonna be another quick one sadly because I spent most of today christmas shopping and I’m probably not going to be doing poetry or more blogging this week because this month is really busy for me, at work and obviously in my real life.
I was kidding myself when I thought I could get Diana done this week or the next, it’s gonna carry through to next month. I just don’t have the time to get in depth on it. I’m not just dotting i’s and crossing t’s I’m totally restructuring it and that takes time and a lot of concentrated effort. But it’ll all be worth it in the end I’m hoping. Otherwise I’m pretty much as fucked as I suspect. The spectre of doubt is looming hard and let’s just say I’m not feeling the christmas spirit one little bit. 
Just more confused and deranged as time goes on. I really don’t know what I’m going to do if this isn’t it, well I know but I don’t like it.
Fuck me, this is a grim christmas, was last year this grim? Probably not. Last christmas I had plans to go see the only person that matters to me and this year I don’t have the money and it’s my own stupid fault. I really fucked up. I just need one win. I miss her so much.
–
 
What we learnt from Letho was feeble, as it appeared Ericcson’s true quarrel was no amateur braggart. Letho guarded his identity with much more zeal as we could ascertain not even a physical description. The way he described it, it appeared they’d met on some role playing forum devoted to some obtuse writer of cult fame.
 
With some peculiarity they’d struck an ospicious bargain to meet masked at Ericcson’s house. Then to carry out the crime never having met in person without their masks. Coming in separate cars and leaving alone after committing the crime.
 
It seemed very strange to me but upon remembering my circumstances it didn’t seem too far out of the realm of possibilities. It had occurred to me Ericcson could not be the killer of his wife and most if not all of what he said was confirmed by this complete stranger. If his testimony could be verified as correct through the inhuman torture Ericcson inflicted on him.
 
There was something that gave me pause, a moment of strange clarity as Ericcson asked him softly and grimly why he did it. There was almost a moment of confusion, as if the question was obvious or didn’t even occur to him. His eyes rolled in his head and glazed over for a moment before he looked at Ericcson with a stark dumb cow-like expression before saying “Huh”.
 
Although he didn’t prove totally useless, a quick turnover of his pockets turned out a card from an erotic bookstore on the other end of town. There was a small note written on the back in pencil that said “Ask for Lucas”.
 
A thorough search of his phone elicited a series of messages from someone only listed as ‘L’ in his contacts. It seemed like no minor coincidence. Was it possible that one or two of the accomplices had broken the bonds of their anonymity packed and made contact in the real world unmasked? Or at the very least planned to do so.
 
It seemed altogether likely and since Ericsson and I had little else to go on it was pertinent for us to at least call the number. And do as the note had instructed; ‘ask for Lucas’.
 
Stealing himself away in some small coffee shop closer to the edge of town, the town of which was littered with them. Full to the brim with all manner of social outcasts all tapping away with their heads down under woollen hats. Sadly I lacked a notion for directions even when my head was attached to its body. After the separation it was much harder for me to orientate myself despite the fact it seemed to be more important than ever. I couldn’t say where exactly we were with what little I could see from the hole in the bag. I could smell the coffee and the lonely desperation of its patrons. The nasally cries of adolescents asking for increasingly innane concoctions of coffee all containing soy.
 
He began to punch in the number on the card of Letho’s phone, of which we had commandeered as at present he had no use for it. The image of his deflated corpse passed in front of my eyes suddenly but I felt no tinge of guilt or human sorrow. Just a pale flash of rememberance, a filing away of a person. In my memory he sat hunched, looking flat and pale and dull. His eyes and mouth inhumanely stretched in indescribable horror as a black ichor dripped out of every orifice. A wrinkling of my nose was the only reaction and an odd sinking feeling as I knew I would have to see more. Much more before the day was through riding as I was on the right hand of the devil.
 
He held the phone to his ear listening as it rang. It rang two or three times before a nasal voice of what could have been a teenage boy or a young woman answered and uttered the vile name of the place she worked. A vapid disgusting pun relating to sexual acts I feel no need to glorify in my notes. Needless to say she said them with some shrill glee that peaked at a dull metronome having said it many times before. Each time losing it’s charm and comic timing for her.
 
“Hi this is Debbie, what fantasy can I fulfil for you today?” She said. Her voice was hoarse and unfeminine.
 
“I was told to ask for Lukas”
 
“Lukas isn’t here today”
 
“Do you know when he’ll be in?”
 
“Jeez, I dunno, why don’t you ask him?”
 
“Do you have his house number?”
 
“He’s the boss, of course I have his house number but I’m not gonna give it out to every random guy that calls.”
 
“He’s an old friend of mine.”
 
“Oh yeah? How many piercings does he have in his face?
 
“Seven”
 
“Wrong answer asshole, he doesn’t have any piercings- in his face”. And with that she slammed the phone down and the line went dead.
 
“Well that was unproductive” I said.
 
It didn’t take him long to find the seedy little hole in the wall, sandwiched as it was between a dry cleaners and another damnable coffee shop. A small flat single storey boxy building with blacked out windows and a stainless steel door.
 
Ericcson pushed it open with me swinging by his side. A chinchy chime rang over the door. Looking over the racks overflowing with the worst smut and degenerate filth there was a girl flipping through the pages of a magazine.
 
Ericcson had taken now to wearing something of a disguise but sunglasses indoors in my opinion did little to detract attention. But it seemed he’d also gained some sensitivity to light with his new found, I’m reluctant to say ‘powers’.
 
He marched briskly to the counter stopping not one second to cast a curious gaze at the layers of smut and filth covering all four walls. I almost felt a little thankful that I had lost all urges relating to these acts with losing the relevant appendages. Viewing them in this form made my non-existant stomach churn, acts both degrading and unsanitary to say the least. It boggled the mind that there was such a species with as little taste and decorum as this. That almost took it’s reproductive act as some sort of sport or sad melancholy cynical joke.
 
–

If you want to read more of this chapter head on over to inkitt Ask for Lukas

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Loverman Chapter 5 ‘The thirsty dog’

Good day to you monstrous lovecraftian abominations young and old.
Been another weird week for me as far as personal life stuff goes, very distracting to say the least, weird but in a good way. Happiness for me in a lot of ways is sort of disconcerting, a high with an inevitable drop at the end. It’s little wonder that there so much of me that longs for the predictability, the safety of misery.
No one including myself can let me down if my expectations are always that of inevitable misery, a fool hopes for any above that but at the same time, I would let it come over me if it wished.
I mean it goes without saying I’m a weird guy and a lot of the time I wonder really what I have to offer a woman above my looks and other… talents. Aside from those things I’m not much of a catch honestly, I’m pretty fucking horrible if I do say so myself and I’m broke as shit haha.
So usually if a woman likes me I feel like I need to sit her down on a couch and have someone with a goatee and a german sounding name take a good long look at her haha.
Anyway that aside, I am ashamed to say I still haven’t completed the editing of Diana, it pains me, but all my effort will be put into it and despite personal life engagements and work and hell and high water, it will be done hopefully this week, definitely the next and then I can do a final run through it, do the all important spellcheck haha. Then off it goes to be prodded by shrewd unfeeling bean counters to be measured and hopefully found in good stead.
Oh I finally finished that Shadow pulp, the first one and honestly it was kind of underwhelming. It didn’t really have a punchy ending it just sort of fizzled out. Very disappointing considering how the rest of it shook out. I expected the shadow to straight up murder everyone and instead he just fannied around a bit and then the police arrested everyone like some lame scooby doo shit.
It just fell sort of flat considering how well they’d built up the shadow to that point, sort of a scary ghostlike figure, everywhere and nowhere, merciless and precise. I just feel like the story was sort of shackled by it’s time and if it were written now it would’ve been either totally shit and filled with political bullshit or awesome haha.
Kinda considering doing my own Shadow pulp, might spitball some ideas while I read the next one which I hope will be a little darker if you forgive the really lazy pun sort of, I guess it’s a pun. Shadow/darker, sort of, fuck it who cares?
It didn’t bore me to tears like the witcher did, the story was ok, the characters were ok, the action was pretty good and the shadow was great, it was a good mystery it just felt a little watered down hamfisted. It felt a little toothless. But I still liked it and I really want to read more for sure.
Back to it I guess.
See you… 
–
My monstrous companion and I had found ourselves a quiet spot in an exceptionally seedy and hole in the wall. The thirsty dog was styled in a way that suggested it was an old English pub. By the looks of it, it was just as old and had not seen a broom or a mop since the witches burned. Their ashes probably still swept under the ancient rugs.
 
The place had obviously had something of a makeover. A television playing nothing but sports, football, the American variety, a broken jukebox in the corner. It was fairly cosy place fashioned in all dark woods, drafty, teaming with dark corners and seemingly dark history.
 
We’d positioned ourselves in a corner booth that was fashioned into a little room. Inside old pictures hung on the walls and there was a false fireplace in the corner. The pictures were of an eclectic variety. Spanning from old pictures of antiquated farm equipment and dishevelled old barns. To noblemen with an odious pretraecian aspect to them. Their mouths much larger than normal and their eyes rounded and glassy and bulging. The bar ran by our right side, the corner poking out like a crooked elbow towards the entrance. We had us a full view of people coming and going and the bar itself while allowing us to be neatly tucked out of sight.
 
My cohort dozed in the corner with his long black coat over his head so no curious old geezer might recognise him. It seemed that his new body needed lots of rest but as far as food I’d seen him neither eat nor drink a morsel since we met. As for myself having no stomach or any organs to speak of made the act utterly superlative.
 
He’d left me on watch as I had little more purpose. It may have been startling for the patrons to see a disembodied head even if it was alive and more or less so. I was securely hidden in something a kin to a bowling ball bag but was more or less a thick duffel bag he’d acquired during my sleeping hours. I was inside it and could see through a series small holes he’d made along the sides of the bag.
 
We were waiting for something but for what I was not certain but I was made certain that I would know it when I saw it.
 
The bar was quiet as it was early and only regulars sat like squat frogs, old men plastered to their seats watching and not watching the tv. Drifting in and out of consciousness, waiting for some great wind to waft them away.
 
I had no idea how long it had been since the incident at the asylum, or even what day it was, having no wrist to keep a watch or way of consulting a calendar. I was growing very bored of being like one of those little dogs women like to carry in their purses, small but altogether useless. Few people came and went and none of very much interest, two old women shaking a tin for some such charitable work, a homeless drunk wandering in and out. It had been maybe an hour or more before someone interesting arrived.
 
He was a small stout man of maybe late twenties early thirties with a dark stubbly beard wearing running bottoms. Although I can’t attest to how much running he did and a sweatshirt with a banal slogan on it. His hair was loose and unwashed and his manner was light of foot for a man his size, with boyish soft features and skin. A doughy featureless blob of a human being but nevertheless carrying some dark aura of imminent threat. He addressed the barman curtly, his dark heavy lidded eyes and unwashed face scanning him with some esoteric suspicion. A curl of anger or fear at his lips as I watched him talk without hearing his words. I had some slight talent of reading lips but he was turned away slightly and I could only make out ‘Looking for me’.
 
The barman looked nervous and all together reluctant to do anything more than polish bar glass and wanted to keep very much to himself. But after some prodding from the shadey figure he subtly nodded his head in the direction of the room I and my strange cohort inhabited.
 
The stout youth cast a wary but cautious glance in our direction and started to inch his way across the bar in our direction. He kept his head down as he worked his way down the bar. Trying to look as casual as possible while being anything but. His hand tightly gripping something in his sweatshirt pocket as he laboured his way towards us, his pale flabby face turning a bright pink.
 
He stopped at the jukebox and pretended to browse songs as he took a long sideways glance through the ajar door. Through it I can imagine he could only see Ericcson’s shoes as he was laid out on the booth sleeping like a corpse completely motionless. He put on some loud rock music with excessive symbol bashing and continued to edge closer to the room we occupied.
 
He got to the door of the room and without taking the pistol out of his sweatshirt pocket he prodded the door open as slow as possible the rest of the way.
 
His face was cold and damp looking as he starred glassy eyed with his thick lipped mouth hanging open. His tongue working up spittle as he probed the room with his eyes licking the dry corners of his mouth.
 
A small satisfied smile curled the corners of his mouth as he saw Ericcson fast asleep in the corner of the booth. The man slowly forced the rest of his bulk around the thin glass door before quietly shutting it behind his wide frame.
 
He took the gun all the way out of his sweatshirt pocket hunching forward and silently moved closer to the sleeping figure under the coat.
 
I watched him as like some sort of fat cat he stalked closer to my daemoniac partner. The small calibre automatic pistol gripped tightly in his cherub like chubby mitt. His face swirling with self loathing and vile hatred and fear, sweating and pinkish, his breath laboured and guttural sounding.
 
–
Read the rest over on inkitt. The thirsty dog
 
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Loverman Chapter 4 ‘Let love in’

Bonjour,

Sort of rushing because I’m totally consumed working on Diana, reaching completion. I almost completely forgot about blogging and proofreading other stuff. All my attention is on that right now and it really has to be.

All other stuff is taking a backseat right now until that is done and dusted and as near as perfect as possible until it can fly off to some cold hearted person to shit on.

Ok so that’s all you’re getting and haha, sorry about that but this really is important, this could be it and it needs all my energy and time and love and effort.

See you…

–

I felt the room grow darker and the air heavier as if the room were sinking into an inky black abyss.

 

Jorge leapt from his corner and gripped the writhing tattered figure with his huge brawny arms as Ericcson howled and cried “They were always there waiting! They’ll come for you as they came for me!”

 

Jorge seemed to struggle to keep the much smaller man in place and as I watched in horror I saw odd depressions on his dark skin as if he fought against some invisible colossus and then came an ungodly cracking noise and his arms twisted and snapped back as if he were an insect in the hands of some veracious child.

 

Then I saw Avery, his face drawn in silent horror, his eyes locked on the scene of the large Indian fighting with this invisible force, fumbling blindly in the drawer of his desk.

 

Another hideous cracking noise, sending spurts of blood and vile smelling marrow across the room, hot and viscous as it was, Jorge’s deep booming cries growing louder and then muffled and high pitch and shrill like an animals. I tore my hands from my face glued as they were by sheer fright and I saw his head squeezed as if through shrink wrap, compressed and then pop like a watermelon dropped from ten stories. The rest of his limbs spasmsing with some electric impulse, torn asunder by the invisible tendrils.

 

Avery, his aphable bearded face was white as a sheet and his hand was ever whiter as it gripped the handle of a pistol he aimed in the general direction of Ericcson firing wildly and hitting only the walls of his tiny office and me in my gut, the burning pain seering my flesh like a hot iron.

 

Then his hand was gripped by some unseen impulse and it was snapped as if it was a twig, the bone protruding out of the skin, his heart beating fast pumping out tiny spurts of dark red blood over his desk as he coughed and hiccuped the gun dropping into my lap glazed in a warm sheen of his vital fluids.

 

I fumbled the thing frantically with one arm, the other to stem the bleeding from my wound. The gun was hot and wet and I’d never even seen one outside of a film before let alone handled or fired such a thing. I gripped it in both hands and tried to make it hold still but for it’s incessant shaking in my boney fingers. I squeezed it aiming at the mass of opalescent tendrils stretching out from Ericcson and he vomited the vile things into this world.

 

Avery eyes bulged out of his skull as the invisible arms squeezed him, the veins in his face growing long and distended and then bursting, the blood of which seeping into his clothes.

 

I squeezed the trigger as hard as I could but it felt hot and slippery in my hands and it wouldn’t stay still, I had to fight the thing to stay straight and will the trigger to fire and the hammer to fall and when it did there was only a distinct pinching sensation around my neck and then blackness.

 

Only a feeling of falling, an emptiness, a deep black nothingness, tumbling forever and then a light, a horrible light and a screaming which could only have been my own but seemed to be that of a babies first, a new birth, a new horrible world born before me as I opened my eyes.

–

Read the rest on inkitt.

Let love in

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Loverman Chapter 3 ‘Man of constant sorrow’

The name of this chapter is only a coincidence haha.

Hell of a week, had the worst shift of life at work to date, I almost got down on my knees and prayed to Trump to get me through it haha. And then more unpleasantness followed that was to a point where I wondered if my life was actually a practical joke. The events being so farcical I doubted I was awake. None of which I can really go into, needless to say if I could afford a therapist he would hear about the whole humiliating affair at length.

And I would be way more bummed out about the whole disaster if something great hadn’t happened directly after, well I should say something terrifying and then wonderful. Well I’m not counting all my chickens yet but I’m also not thinking about sticking my head in an oven to make God laugh. So that’s something.

I got a message that the one of the most important people to me was sick and my heart hit the basement until I was told she was ok and I saw her sunshiny face again. So relieved and happy and then something weirder happened, I got swept back up into something I was sure was dead and gone with something as easy as a smile. It only took a smile to shine a light on feelings I was sure were gone. We’re taking it slow for now, for the first time in our history together but I know it’ll be worth it.

That’s all because I’ve been reading bugger all this week but what I did read of the shadow on my way to work I really loved mainly because of the way the story is told. It’s all third person from the perspective of someone who is witnessing the shadow and it makes it delightfully creepy. The shadow is almost some kind of monster and it’s really good, like the main character is the right hand of the devil almost. I really like it, it’s old but still manages to be engaging and creepy and interesting.

Anyway gotta get down to doing some editing or proofreading, it’s not gonna do itself after all haha.

See you…

 

 

–

I turned in horror and revulsion, could it speak, was it listening to us?

It seemed to shudder for a moment and then a noise like air escaping a tire, a dull low hissing as air came to it’s dry cracked lips and then a voice from far away, like someone talking at the end of a far flung hallway.

“Had to” The voice was strained and it seemed to amount to a strange buzzing as if there were bees caught in his throat, his voice giving off a strange vibration. “Coates”

“What about Coates?”

“He wouldn’t stop”

“Wouldn’t stop?”

“Asking about my dreams”

“So what did you do to him?”

“Stopped him”

“Would you mind telling Henry about the night you lost your wife, would that be alright?”

I swallowed waiting for his response, all at once his eyes focused and he looked at me with a pained searching glance that I couldn’t describe.

“Yes”

“Well go ahead.”

“I was- trying- trying to find something.” He swallowed, his voice brimming with that strange buzzing noise scratching at his throat. “My work, it became stale, the spark- died and I was having to dig deeper to find inspiration. Using a form of meditation and salt solution I could induce trance like states to better commune with the great darkness.”

“The great darkness” I asked dreamily.

“A place inside, a dreamstate, source for my inspiration.”

All at once I remembered the paintings in the day room, the strange vistas and odd creatures and remembering in the past his work seemed quite benign. Not post-modern but classical almost, capturing a singular beauty from nature but the market has no great demand for paintings such as those these days and I could recall his style had become quite abstract and strange almost terrifying, beastly in their suggestion. Some far flung horribleness that could only be glimpsed in dreams.

“I knew what I was doing might be- dangerous, but I had little choice, I feared that everything I had built would come crumbling down if I turned back. That if I did not press forward I might have to resort to painting children’s faces on the boardwalk to put food on the table. I feared my wife might leave me if I couldn’t keep her in the life she’d grown accustomed to, so I had no choice – for what we do for love is risk damnation itself.” He let out a pained airless cough. “and I did love her, a fearful terrible quaking love that every fibre of my being feared to lose.-

It started like nothing at all at first, my dreams only having the vaguest hints of the nightmares I later saw. I had thought my dreams were just a result of an elaborate imagination, growing up I had fanciful notions as most children do, of knights and castles and great dragons. But this was so alien it hardly fit into any mainstream folklore at all.

It seemed like every day I spent meditating I could feel myself getting closer to something awesome. And in my dreams I felt even less inhibition and control. As if something were drawing me further down a long a stairway, odd shapes twisting in the distance.

Something I remembered most distinctly were fish. Not unlike our worlds fish but these glowed with a cosmic opulence and danced around my head as if in water, drawing me closer down into the dark waterless ocean.

I felt myself growing lighter and more lurid with each step I took the path behind me a sturdy rushing wall of water.

Each morning I woke feeling unrested, like I’d been walking all night just like my dream, my mind had no retreat and I could feel a strange pull even in my waking hours. I meditated and felt myself slipping away and pulling myself back from the brink with whatever morsel of inspiration I could pluck from the torrent of black madness down there in it’s depths.

I felt as if I was an invisible watcher a voyeur, dis-embodied floating above the strange eon old city under the waves. Nothing could see me or touch me, I had the invulnerability of the watcher and I could glance at the strange structures before me with their haunting shapes and maw-like open doorways, windowless and dark.

I would wake and sketch them as best as I could remember but as time went on I felt myself feeling more and tired and withdrawn like I’d never slept those nights at all and I was just lying there awake.

It got worse as I’d paint, I could swear it, those fish, they’d followed me. I saw them while I was awake, only fleeting glances of them in the corners of my eyes, just enough to tell myself I didn’t see them at all but to give a gnawing feeling of coming darkness. That crushing blackness closing in on me.

I had no idea what I was doing, I was just an aimless wanderer in a world I didn’t understand, glimpsing behind the curtain of night not knowing whether something was looking back at me from the darkness.”

“And was there? Something watching?” I asked almost shaking, without even thinking of my words as I stared into the strange man’s milky eyes.

–

Man of constant sorrow

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Loverman Chapter 2 ‘The weeping song’

I got back the second to last part of Diana and I spoke to my editor after blowing my wad on the last round of editing and she says I should get it back soon, whatever that means haha. But yeah so that’s happening, that other thing is probably happening. Compared to how shitty I’ve felt for the last couple of months I feel pretty good, I’m really happy right now and honestly I don’t like it, I wish it would stop haha.

Maybe playing more red dead 2 will make me more miserable. Probably gonna do a review of that because everyone I know says it’s pretty underwhelming and honestly so far I can’t disagree. Like there’s nothing really about it that blows me away honestly. It kinda just feels like another red dead game, it’s not really that special. Definitely falls short so far comparing it to GTAV. I don’t mind the slow pace as long it’s building towards something and it’s immersive like Kingdom come deliverance. I loved the slow beginning of that game. Really need to do another playthrough of that game. I can’t remember the last time I was so immersed in a game.

Anyway, dying need to nap or do some proofreading or something.

Bye!

–

She kept up a dizzying pace through the old building, but I could hardly object to the brevity of the tour since it appeared to be just a series of long hallways looking all alike.

 

“This is the day room”

 

She opened a door that looked no different from any of the rooms we’d seen before. Despite that it had no viewing window and opened onto a large rectangular room with almost greenhouse windows on the walls and in portions of the ceiling.

 

“This is something like a solarium, they used to think the sunshine had medicinal effects, we use it as a common area, they have art supplies and games they can play.” She said directed me to deshevelled pile of soiled board game boxes and art supplies collected in a half closed closet. The room itself was empty but for a series of rounded tables made of a cheap chipboard wood with a few simple plastic chairs dotted around them and a few beanbag chairs. The carpet was a dull cream colour and the ceiling tiles were deeply sodden asbestos tiling with neon lights running in parralles across the ceiling.

 

I looked around the room as it stood empty, littered as it was with papers and crude paintings on the walls. The paintings depicting oddly shaped buildings. Or so it seemed, although obscurest in nature, following no known Euclidian geometry and copying no style I had ever seen before. Despite that they were quite skilfully reproduced as if from memory.

 

“Oh you noticed that”

 

She said spying my eye caught by the odd painting.

 

“We have a number of artists budding or otherwise that come here.”

 

“Oh really?”

 

“Are you a fan of the arts Mr Tilinghast.”

 

“Henry, please, to my friends.”

 

She seemed to scoff and then smile.

 

“I’ve eyes like anyone else” I said attempting something close to aloofness.

 

“The director seems to think artists are more susceptible to madness than ordinary men”

 

“Oh, why’s that?”

 

“It’s nothing he would publish for peer review, but he seems to think your mind has to be half gone already to be an artist in this economy.” She smiled and I stifled a laugh which cooled to a morbidity as I studied the sad truth in that statement.

 

I sighed in agreement and continued to study the room. It was bright which was odd due to the weather being as grey and dim as it was. The room seemed to glow with an eerie effulgence, it had to be something to do with the placing of the room and the windows harnessing the light.

 

“Please take your time to look at some of their work, the room is closed for today.”

 

I took her up on her offer and started to perouse some of the paintings, most of which were marked with the same signature. The scribbling did seem familiar but I couldn’t make out the name. The paintings seemed to correlate with the others, odd cyclopean structures, strangely shaped humanoid creatures. It seemed almost like the interpretation of a childs drawing done by a skilled hand.

 

“Closed?” I said idly not taking my eyes off an etching of a bust done in charcoal. The bust was some strange abstract creature that seemed to have the head of octopus and the body of some kind of reptile with wings with large clawed feet sitting prone on a pedestal.

 

“We had an incident the other day with one of our patients.”

 

“An incident” I aped thoughtlessly losing myself in the strange chimera like creature in the etching. Noticing then that were some very similar drawings done like but in what seemed like a childs hand, and still more in differing styles until it seemed to be something of a contest to draw the eldritch squatting thing.

 

I turned to her and saw she was motioning with her eyes at a patch on the floor. My eyes following her to see a portion of the cream carpet that had been removed in a large square with a box cutter a slight shadow of a brown stain on the exposed wooden boards below it.

 

“We’re having someone come in on Friday to replace it”.

 

“I see”.

 

“I’ll take you to see the director now if you’d like, he should be in his office.”

 

She led me down another hallway indistinguishable from the others we’d just traversed to a door with golden sign with the name Avery Fournier – Director Pink Bird Sanitarium embossed on it.

 

The door itself was a firm red oak with the top panelled cut out to make way for an ornate opaque glass screen. And as the light was shining I could seemingly make out two figures and could catch something of a conversation going on inside.

 

“He must be busy, should we come back later?” I asked.

 

“No he’s expecting you, he might just be recording something, if we enter quietly it shouldn’t be a problem”. She smiled and motioned towards the door holding her clipboard tightly to her chest and pushing her glasses up on her nose as if touching up a careful costume.

 

I clasped the door handle getting a slight jolt of something but not removing my hand. A sudden striking feeling of unease came over as if I was about to open a door to a party of people dancing over my own grave.

 

Opening the door as gingerly and as politely and inobtrusively as possible I entered with my head bowed like a monk seeking safe passage through some savage mongol land. But to my surprise I was greeted by a most affable and rotund looking old gentlemen sat smiling warmly above a great and bushy mustache.

 

The man instantly put me at ease with his effortlessly pleasant manner and way of speaking.

 

“Henry, is that you, take a seat old boy, you must have had quite a journey.” He addressed me queerly as if he were some old friend or an uncle rarely visited but gladly accepting of any such chance encounter.

 

Finding myself caught off guard by his amiable appearance at knowing me, I had but silent stammering in answer.

 

“You must be exhausted, where did you say you were coming from? Boston was it?”

 

“N-new Hampshire actually.” I said tracing my hands feverishly along the back of one of the high wingbacked chairs in front of the man’s small but neat desk.

 

Fournier’s office was little more than broom closet in size, a very humble room for a seemingly very humble and benign figure. But despite the size, the furnishing were old and eloguent, the smell of treated leather and hardwood was thick in such a tight space and nevertheless it gave way to an informal comfiness that was quite unbefitting an office of such stature.

 

“Would you like a toffee?” He asked standing to pass me a large glass bowl of individually wrapped toffees.

 

“Erm no- no thank you” I said smiling.

 

“Hmm” He smiled and sighed before putting the bowl down and unwrapping one for himself and fiendishly popping it into his mouth grazing his bushy white moustache. He smiled again and said “I must admit I’m quite partial to them” He narrowed his eyes and then at once as if he forgot something said “Oh of course, I’m forgetting myself, would you like one Zane?” He said lifting the bowl in the direction of the wingback chair to my right.

–

Check out the rest of the chapter on inkittttt The weeping song

 

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Loverman Chapter 1 ‘Paint a vulgar picture’

Ok truthfully just desperate for content at this point and not really feeling up to starting Diana two, I dunno, I just feel kind of drained creatively, might be something to do with my sleep patterns but I don’t feel super pumped about it. And I don’t wanna start anything unless I’m ready to start it. So I’m just back in the trenches finishing this off, which is one of the stories I started and sort of abandoned when I lost focus of where it was going.

I think I literally abandoned this story to write the first Diana so I’m kind of hoping for that to happen again, just to be writing this not really knowing where I’m going then boom get hit the lightning bolt again.

I didn’t abandon this because it was shit, I just kind of lost my place because this is a story I didn’t write out a really detailed plan for, now I write out these really detailed chapter breakdowns I almost never look at but they’re there in my brain. But for this it was sort of up in the air and I can’t really place, I’m not sure what I was doing with it so it’s harder to keep pace on it.

Just trying to keep my mind busy so I don’t go insane, kind of ironic considering the subject matter. I do love Lovecraft but I dunno it feels sort of hollow copying him or trying to make it into a marvel haha. I dunno, it just doesn’t get my blood pumping as much as Cur did, well I don’t anything could get my blood pumping as much as Cur did. Too soon for a sequel to that but I should start work on a plan for it at least, the plan for Diana two was finished ages ago, I just might want to go over it again.

In other news really enjoying the latest Parker book it sort of starts off as a normal Parker book and slowly escalated into an all out war bringing back some of the best characters from the series, even one from the fucking dead haha. I tried finding info on this but I could swear this one character died in a previous book this books references and I went back and sure enough, he’s dead as a doornail, I guess Westlake just forgot haha. Which is so weird because of how he seems so good and keeping all these characters alive in his universe. To miss bringing a guy back from the dead haha. Maybe it was a different Ed Mackey with the same wife haha. I dunno, I’ll give it a pass, he is a cool character.
Also so stupidly excited about this but I managed to track down and pirate all the conan, shadow and solomon kane pulps and I can’t wait to read them. So I’m gonna be knee deep in like 1920’s era pulp fiction for a while, should be really fun and inspiring. I can’t wait to get into it.

Anyhoo, hours a waining and I need to do some proof reading, wasted too much time already setting up the Loverman Inkitt page for you to mosey on over to.

See you…

–

On recollection of that singularly disgusting building my mind is hesitant to reconstruct the image of the hideous fuchea paint. Which cast over it like a layer of bubbled pink flesh hanging over a rancid rotting skeleton of a building. The colour of which I might imagine of those many chosen people who were exposed to a noteably vile a substance as cyanide gas intended as such for vermin. Their bodies bloated and pink, skin bubbling like that of a suckling pig slowly roasted over an open flame. The bones of the building that of an old English town house, transported brick by brick from such old haunts as Glastonbury. Home to such tails of wicked faeries that would disappear unlucky travellers who might have the poor fortune to rest upon a certain rock deemed sacred to the cruel ironic justice of the fae folk.

 

To this day I have seldom the choice to replay this ‘event’ over and over in my head. As it was this soggy new England morning in maine that I was to lose my grip on the mortal coil for better or worse.

 

It was a notably wet early morning that I was to set foot on the grounds of the Pink Bird mental asylum as it stood in the October of 1994 in the new England town of Presque isle maine.

 

Having graduated from a university of note some years before I was applying for a newly opened position at the facility. I’d hasten to add I had grown irritated at relaying which university I’d graduated from. As it seemed to invoke strange and morbid fascination from anyone that heard the name which is why I refuse to mention the accursedly wicked place even in these notes I scrawl now. Strange rumours dogged it of doctors coming from there possible forty years hence conducting strange research into the reanimation of dead flesh. I had no interest in such study for it was the mind that interested me. It became increasingly more irritating as people seemed to imbue me with vicarious curiosity at the history and rumours that abound said university of which I deem to remain nameless. It’s past neither in my time there nor in my present state interested me at all.

 

That being said I can’t help remarking on my present predicament and wandering if the accursed place had some hand in my misfortune.

 

I approached the building which I had remarked looked like a corpse prepared hastily for an open casket viewing. A make over having possibly taken place in the early seventies had not aged well and as it sat off the beaten track in the back country of new England.

 

The garden was slightly overgrown, the hedges seemed to crawl out and attempt to swallow the narrow path that led from the road. A large bare tree stood in the court before the building reaching up into the slate coloured sky of that misty morning. The colours of the hedges a mix of deep damp greens and autumnal oranges and browns forming a mash of living and dying rott. The smell of which was slightly sweet.

 

I approached the building in an old crysler my mother had left me passing a few years prior. The car was in fairly good condition but wide and maneuvered like that of an old tugg boat on choppy waters. As I wasn’t the most robust figure of a man I was prone to car sickness which made me slightly light headed as the car lurched around the tight oval curve of the main court around that old bare tree with it’s dark grey bark.

 

I parked as near the entrance as I felt was polite as there was no markings of any kind and only one other car parked in a similar fashion. But notably of more refined taste, a dark blue bently with tasteful chrome wheels.

 

I ascended a steep set of slightly damp stone steps to reach a large but ramshackle white wooden door as cracked and creased as the rest of the paint work on the old building. The whole thing looming over my head looked like a sore open wound crawling with unwanted plant life like dry boney fingers peeling at the cracks in the saturated fuschia paint.

 

Taken with some odd ceremony I knocked on the old door and was met with silence and then a dull echoing noise I attributed to the age of the building. But sounded oddly almost like a person sighing deeply or the sound of sawing wood.

 

After getting no response from my peculiar inclination to knock as if it was episode of downtown abbey and I was about to be greeted by some overly verbose woman in a bustiare. I shuddered at the thought and twisted the old rusty doorknob which released a coppery scent and then popped open with a shudder that ripped through the entire frame and an awful creaking scraping noise that went through me like the sound of grinding teeth.

 

“Oh I’m sorry” A young woman said as I almost fell on her through the door as it gave way faster than I thought it might. “I should have warned you about the door, I heard you knocking I was just…”

 

I was taken by her instantly, a beauty of note, her blonde hair tied into a tight but full bun secured in place with what looked like a chopstick. A set of small reading glasses perched on the tip of a short sharp nose below of which rested a set of full pursed lips painted with a muted dark pink lipstick which seemed to match the sparse spackling of light freckles on her cheeks.

 

Her lidded eyes were green and distinctive under neatly plucked eyebrows, perfect eyelashes beating like that of a butterflies wing. Her face a delicate pale canvas of faintly german irish features.

–

Read the rest of this chapter on inkitt. Paint a vulgar picture

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Blue Velvet

It sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it but one of my biggest influences when I write right now and in the creative process in general is David Lynch.

Which is odd to say it’s pretentious because Lynch’s work, I find remarkably unpretentious, so distinctly odd without necessarily trying to be, just unrestrainedly uncommon and intriguing. Every one of his films and Twin Peaks is almost like someone took the idea of film making or a tv show and handed it to an Alien and he made his own interpretation that was like what had come before but so drastically but indescribably different. Something you just couldn’t put your finger on but it was rolling around in your brain itching in the corners of your eyes and just couldn’t get it.

I’m not a lifelong fan, I had seen the Elephantman and Dune but I think I was too young to have been caught up in Twin Peaks at the time of its release and those two movies are probably the worst ones to watch in retrospect. Both films are constrained by one being true and the other being based on a sci-fi novel.

So he slipped through the cracks, while I was quite happy with my Tarantino’s and my Scorcese’s and whomever else grazed my adolescent movie palate.

Until I saw a film that really struck an odd note with me that sticks with me even now and no it wasn’t actually by David Lynch *plot twist* it was by Jennifer Lynch, his talented daughter. The movie was called Surveillance, a really haunting off kilter thriller, I love even to this day. But what really stuck with me was the sound track.

The music was haunting and jarring and really something else, I couldn’t help tracking down the soundtrack and finding my favourite song from the film which was called ‘Speed Roadster’ written and performed by… David Lynch.
Who was this alternative/electro/country sounding singer I’d never heard of but couldn’t get enough of; oh what he’s the director’s father? And he’s a writer/director (/among other things, painter/actor) as well? Wow.

Then rather ashamedly I started to put together the dots and I had heard a lot of talk about I think True Detective and how it was ‘like twin peaks’ which in some respects is true. It does capture that haunting sorrow of the unavoidable nature of life and the boundless horror of the unknown (a little Lovecraftian in that respect too, despite it being based on the Yellow King mythos). I may be rewriting my own history here, I can’t be sure, so instead of watching True Detective I watched Twin Peaks (And then eventually True detective) and I was captivated, a little bored/confused at times but I had to keep watching.

There was just something about it, something that made me want to laugh but also cry bitterly and it held me in this state between sorrow and a drunk sort of happiness and each emotion seemed to feed off the other and deepen, the depths of the humour dug larger holes for the sorrow to hide and when the credits rolled over Laura’s face you remembered why you were here.

Frankly I was amazed that such a compelling show could be written about one murder, I can hardly concentrate long enough through an episode of csi or the walking dead where the cast drops like flies.

It was amazing that one fictional person’s life could touch so many people in so many different ways and although she wasn’t technically a character, Laura was the show.

So I initially got into David Lynch not even knowing he made films or tv shows, I just thought he was a weird old guy that made cool music. I loved introducing my brother to Lynch because we watched all his films together and I can’t remember if we watched the Twin Peaks movie Fire walk with me first or not but he hadn’t seen the show before watching. There’s this bit where some weird shit happens and my brother turns to me expecting me to know what the fuck it means because I watched the show and I was like; ‘Dude, I don’t fucking know’ and it was pretty funny.
I was told it didn’t matter if you watched the movie or the show first but I’m glad I watched the show first because it completely depicts Laura’s murder, something I think should never have been done.

In the classic Poe style mystery, the greatest mysteries are the ones that go unsolved.

But producers and ratings and money and bing bang boom, they ruined the whole mystery and then the show limped on after until it eventually keeled over with the help of Billy Zane??

Season 2 in my opinion is a complete clusterfuck, I hold out hope for the reboot, but I intend to keep my expectations as low as possible and coddle myself in the warm embrace of my favourite Lynch films, Blue Velvet being one.

The thing that separates Lynch from any other of my influences is that I not only learnt a lot about story telling from him but also about the creative process in general. I think it’s in a Tom Waits song (Of which the name escapes me) where he says David Lynch told him that he had to sit in a comfy chair and close his eyes and wait for the big one to come along.

Although he may have been alluding to his transcendental meditation woo of which I am not subscribed (I can sit in a chair with my eyes closed without paying like ten quid a month to some swami or whatever) as a fan of Lovecraft this struck a chord with me.

There’s a part of me that is deeply sceptical of woo, all things woo but there’s another part that believes that stories are located in a river in a different dimension and when we close our eyes and concentrate we can catch the odd big fish.
All stories are essentially the same in structure but the core principals of the story come from somewhere else, they’re pieced together from dreams and movies and conversations and some ultra-terrestrial other or just plain pulled out of your ass.

But sometimes I can’t help feeling that I’m not creating stories, I’m just uncovering something that was already there or giving life to something long dead and that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite it most likely being bullshit it gives me a nice Lovecraft boner, like I’m in my own story and some ungodly horror is going to burst into the room and tentacle rape me.. what was that noise? On the stairs, it can’t be…*gasp* my eyes, my ey..*indiscernible screaming*.

Check out more strips at Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg the comic strip
And my Lynchian mystery comic here Bat Country

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